I want to touch base with everyone here on something. I’ve read just about every crank site out there with their ‘reasoning’ about why the hardware for the 360 launch was not more widely available. Several folks want to blame Microsoft as some kind of evil monopoly trying to twist the entire market to their world view. First, before you get out your tinfoil hats, lets remember two things:

1. Microsoft is not the monopoly here - there is some pretty fierce competition within the console hardware game. Yes, the players are limited, but I bet we can all come up with the same “other company” that is also well known for their hardware in this context. Duh. So MS trying to limit the install base of their platform makes ZERO SENSE. Now with that established let’s move on:

2. Just because you can lose money, doesn’t mean you like it. A lot of the people I see screaming conspiracy theory point out that MS will still make money this year, as if this somehow by definition means that they screwed their launch on purpose just to prove a point. What? It’s still a company, and last I checked they were still in the games business to make money, just like everyone else. Underneath all the vaneer of “giving the user the best entertainment experience possible” is just “we’re going to make money on games”. It’s that simple. And once again, selling fewer boxes doesn’t do that.

Now, as to what really happened - Microsoft screwed up. They made a mistake, and in doing so they hurt the market channel for publishers pretty bad right there around Christmas time, which is a bad, bad thing. I won’t bore you with the details, because we’ve all seen them floating around CNN Money and the like. But what I thought was interesting on the boat were the reations by employees at Redmond, both in games and out of games.

MS has a really interesting corporate culture in that you almost never hear anyone remarking about a different portion of the company in the absence of themselves. Things are almost always referred to as “we did this well” or “we did this poorly” but never “that crew over in Office really screwed up.” Say what you want to about MS, and certainly with many folks there is no love lost, but in a company of that size I find that to be somewhat commendable. The same held true in talking about 360 - everyone I talked too, from the Visual Studio team, MS Research, MS Games, X-box core, etc. all had the same response - “we really screwed up.”

But the reaction from people was more than that, it was almost downright human. Some people were very sheepish about it, didn’t want to talk about it in public, as if mistakes were just an uncomfortable topic. Others were, I think, legitimately embarrassed. Still others were angry - angry at the company for damaging the distribution channel and for damaging corporate trust in the marketplace. I think beyond angry a lot of folks were just frustrated that it didn’t go better, they had planned for a much better experience and it didn’t come through. Someone made the comment that this would have never happened in the early Windows days - that things needed to return to tighter processes. But no one was passing blame around, everybody took their lumps. Would that academia would do that sometimes (rolls eyes).

So I went looking to see if all the conspiracy theories were right. It doesn’t make a lot of difference to me, I can’t afford a next-gen console just yet anyway, but its always fun to read Internet speculation on why a company has forcibly done this or that. What I found instead were a group of human beings that felt bad about a situation that seemed a bit beyond their control. Liz and I both take it on the chin sometimes for having decent things to say about Microsoft. Well, sometimes the storm-troopers turn out to be people.